


Cygnet

by darthjamtart



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 2, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-03-02
Packaged: 2018-03-16 00:38:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3467903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darthjamtart/pseuds/darthjamtart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Do you like swans, child?” the queen had asked you, and you had shrugged. You’ve never given birds much thought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cygnet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [angel_vixen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_vixen/gifts).



You feel it on the back of your neck, first: a low prickling, as though you are being watched. A sensation that isn’t, the fine hairs at your nape standing on end. Your skin draws tight, pebbling as the feathers cascade over you, burying you in tender down. You open your mouth to cry out, and a beak lets out a harsh, wracking _honk_.

“I think the gardens’ atmosphere would benefit from the elegance of swans,” the queen, your stepmother, had announced at breakfast. She had tapped the edge of her silver spoon against the hollowed-out shell from her soft-boiled egg, gazing idly around the room. She was lovely in the morning light, like the icicles that hung from the eaves outside.

Would you miss your own mother more had you ever really known her? Mothers are a distant thing, like fathers. Your own father spends more time tending to affairs of state than he ever has with you.

“Whatever you wish, my love,” your father had said, before leaving with his chancellors.

“Do you like swans, child?” the queen had asked you, and you had shrugged. You’ve never given birds much thought.

You struggle now to open your wings, nearly over-balancing as you adjust to your webbed feet and shortened limbs. Your tail-feathers spread and shift while you flail about, staggering toward the lake. Your head darts wildly, and everything looks strange — the scope of your vision has been altered along with everything else. Out of one eye you can see your stepmother, laughing.

You know enough of magic to lay a curse but not to break one. If you could form the words, you’d make your stepmother choke on thorns, litter her pillow with toads. But when you try to speak, the sounds tangle themselves into blares and squawks.

The queen lets it be known that you have been sent to boarding school. When she wanders the gardens you can see the rising swell of her belly, the clumsy way she stoops to cradle a flower. When your half-sister is born she sounds just like you do now: an angry, squawking thing. A dozen waxings and wanings of the moon, and here you are, a swan on a lake with a little sister who will toddle after you on the shore, trying to pluck the feathers from your tail.

What an inglorious thing, to be a bird.

“Curses are funny things,” the queen muses one afternoon. Already her body is changing, shrinking in on itself. You imagine her lessening, growing smaller and smaller until she is something tiny enough to crush inside your beak. “Will you live a full human’s lifespan like this, or a swan’s decade or two?” She brushes her fingers across the water, sending ripples out to where you are curled moodily in the brush. “I really don’t know,” she says.

An older sibling might have been able to save you. A vow of silence, a garment woven from nettles, some semblance of devotion. Upstairs, the baby squalls in a nursemaid’s arms. Has anyone ever truly loved you? Enough to break a curse, enough to ruin a kingdom?

Slowly, you are forgetting what it means to be human. To be land-bound, wingless, bare-skinned and moon-faced. When the wind sends ripples across the surface of the lake, you can’t help but spread your wings so that the breeze can riffle through your feathers.

Leaving here will mean leaving the only person who knows that you were ever something other than a swan.

The queen drops breadcrumbs by the shore, teaches your toddling sister how to tear a loaf into pieces. When her tiny hands grasp at your feathers, you will launch yourself into flight, soaring away from your stolen home.

  



End file.
